I went to school for electrical engineering, my first job was at an architecture firm designing the electrical stuff for buildings (including making all the electrical drawings for bank branches so we had some professional crossover 😋), and I ended up teaching myself software to automate a bunch of our designs and processes. I was literally directly making building design and construction more efficient … Buuuut… The arch industry pays poorly and I realized they was no way of ever owning a house at the pace I was going so I left for software and doubled my salary in like 2 years. I went from senior electrical engineer to intermediate software engineer and saw a 50% increase… All in a country experiencing a massive potentially existential housing crisis, and the industry pay disparity directly incentivized me to stop working on it and go work doing mostly bullshit software work.
The software industry is grossly overpaid for how hard we work and for how critical our relative contributions are to society, though even in the software industry the pay is incredibly distorted. Orders of magnitude more money goes to random social media bullshit and VC startups that go nowhere than to mission critical teams doing stuff like maintaining security and access control software.
Yeah man, me too.
I went to school for electrical engineering, my first job was at an architecture firm designing the electrical stuff for buildings (including making all the electrical drawings for bank branches so we had some professional crossover 😋), and I ended up teaching myself software to automate a bunch of our designs and processes. I was literally directly making building design and construction more efficient … Buuuut… The arch industry pays poorly and I realized they was no way of ever owning a house at the pace I was going so I left for software and doubled my salary in like 2 years. I went from senior electrical engineer to intermediate software engineer and saw a 50% increase… All in a country experiencing a massive potentially existential housing crisis, and the industry pay disparity directly incentivized me to stop working on it and go work doing mostly bullshit software work.
The software industry is grossly overpaid for how hard we work and for how critical our relative contributions are to society, though even in the software industry the pay is incredibly distorted. Orders of magnitude more money goes to random social media bullshit and VC startups that go nowhere than to mission critical teams doing stuff like maintaining security and access control software.